This dress has pockets E-Book

Hannah Swingler

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 92

Beschreibung

Hannah describes her incredible debut collection of fresh and original poetry best…'I struggle to throw things away. Used envelopes, mostly. This is not only my debut collection of poetry, it is my hoard, my memory bank, my adventure into the known. 'This dress has pockets exudes the feeling of finding a dress that fits in a charity shop for only £4.50 and it has the functionality of pockets that are deep enough to carry unsent love letters and conkers and those memories that you wish you could binge watch, or tape over. It is ethereal but memorable, surreal, but familiar, like a dream you weren't able to keep hold of. It is what it means to remember, what it means to grow up storing your thoughts close to you, in pockets of dresses that make you look alright until you sit down in them. Now is your time to dance in it, now is the time to empty your pockets and spin.'

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Swingler is a poet, teacher and artist, born and bred in Birmingham. She calls a forward roll a ‘gambole’.

She was the winner of CoachesSLAM 2018, as well as coaching the University of Birmingham’s uniSLAM team to victory. She went on to represent the UK at CUPSI in Philadelphia.

She has performed across the country: with Tongue Fu, featuring at Howl, Grizzly Pear, Verve Poetry Festival, Cafe Grande Slam, Stirchley Speaks, and at REP Birmingham, BOM, the Old REP, Ikon Gallery, Upstairs at the Western, Derby Theatre, Oxjam Fest, Birmingham Weekender and mac, amongst others. She featured on BBC radio discussing the importance of poetry for young people.

Hannah is an alumnus of both the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and Beatfreeks YSC.

She believes good things come to those who make.

Twitter: @HannahSwings

www.facebook.com/hannswings

https://hannahswings.com

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

Birmingham, West Midlands, UK

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2019 Hannah Swingler

The right of Hannah Swingler to be identified as author if this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED JAN 2019

Printed and bound in the UK

by TJ International, Padstow

ISBN: 978-1-912565-11-5

ePub ISBN: 978-1-912565-75-7

Cover art by Ceren Kilic

For June and Eileen -

The powerhouse women

who always stole the show.

CONTENTS

Freddie Mercury

Graze

Inventory 1

Say my name

I made a sign for the livingroom door (Dance Show)

Like popcorn kernels

Teach Me Shorthand

Kingsway Picturehouse

Blue is a colour

Inventory 2

Good deed

I left the dress you lent me in Spain

Crown Shyness

How you are using

Tailie

Blanket Fort

Snobs (is a sacred space)

Da Vinci

Amy and Tau have squatter’s rights

You took this job because

off

Seating Plan

BSA

Octopus in a Jar

Wash your mouth out

Mrs Tiggywinkle has fallen of the shelf again

Albatross

Greenhouse Glasses

Inventory 3

Rough Terrain

Apocalypse

Onomatopoeia

Dots

Glaciers

The Collector

Muse

At the end of the night

I keep dreaming of

Yet

Que sera

Hannah Introduces Jess Davies, Asim Khan, Hannah Ledlie and Dennis Nkurunziza.

Acknowledgements

This dress has pockets

Freddie Mercury

When I am nine, my parents move us to the countryside, away from bus routes and gang wars. The house they buy is bigger, too cheap for what it offers and their deliberation doesn’t last long. They don’t think to look at the old wiring; block out the sound of the motorway at the bottom of the garden.

Financial recklessness is hereditary.

We continue to go to school in the city, work in the city: be city dwellers that must sleep where we can see the stars clearer. Thirteen miles there, another thirteen back: the car becomes our living room, our bedroom, our home.

It doesn’t have a CD player, so my brother makes jukebox cassettes, one song per family member then repeat. I choose Jesus of Surburbia by Green Day because it is nine minutes and seven seconds long and I crave the attention.

Fields, trees, abandoned farm buildings, hair pin bends, blind junctions, I know the landscape better than the opening to my favourite movie.

I write birthday cards leaning on headrests without curving a line.

               I can apply a full face of makeup using the rear view mirror

from the backseat.

                           I learn to change outfits without flashing the driver.

                                         I devour books like they will be burnt at the

                                                      end of the day.

My brother falls in love with a girl who lives opposite our school. He stays overnight on a camp bed in her living room, I think. He stops making mix tapes. I am given an ipod for my birthday and spend the mornings staring out of the window pretending I am in a music video.

My mother only drives when my Dad is already home. At night, she turns the lights of on roads without cat eyes and we scream in the seconds of darkness, before we flash back to visibility. One night, we drive passed a man in drag walking in the road towards us. Two weeks later, the local headlines talk of a “decapitated tranny” who got hit by a car on her way home from a dinner party. My Mom stops turning the lights of after that.

Mornings mean minus six degrees and the heater breaks.

I fall in love with a boy who lives opposite my school in an adjacent road to my brother’s girlfriend. I can see my art room from my bedroom window. I stay overnight on a camp bed, sometimes. I’m not sure whether the reason I love him is because I get an extra half an hour of sleep in the morning.

We resurrect Freddie Mercury on a thunder filled October night through a dramatic, unrehearsed yet surprisingly harmonised word-perfect rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody. We congratulate each other on hitting the high notes, swerve to miss a pheasant and hit a tree instead.

When I graduate - after thirteen years of thirteen miles there and thirteen back - my parents move to the road my brother’s now fiancée lives on. I can see my old art-room from my bedroom window. I get an extra half an hour of sleep in the morning. There are bus routes and gang wars and no blind junctions. We do not make mix tapes.

We do not resurrect Freddie Mercury anymore, but I can still apply liquid eyeliner travelling over potholes using the rear view mirror from the backseat.

Graze

The dust doesn’t dance in the sunlight in your room

It’s more like commuters alighting at rush hour

Already tired

Barely slept

The birds have been awake for hours, no nightfall here

They sing through their insomnia

I vow to disconnect the streetlamps

Hope they’ll bring their nests closer

A train speeds under our apartment block

The bed frame shudders

Your leg is above the covers

No monster dares strike and disturb you

There is a scrap of batter shaped graze across your kneecap

I want to touch it, but I don’t

I compare it to my poppy petal thin skin, translucent

Painted in gouache: an Egon Schiele prep sketch

I don’t remember the last time I played so wildly I lost my

balance.

Your graze is starting to scab into rows of backstitch

The colour of undiluted squash

I bet it itches, I want to itch it

But I don’t

I can smell the new soap I bought yesterday on your skin

Mixed in with sleep, with your eye crust

With the dust from the sheet

Not changed in weeks

I have never willed for a moment to lodge in my memory

Like seeing you so still

I want to photograph your scars

As proof that our bodies want us to keep going

Consciously, I run my fingers

Over the system of purple streams

Miles before they meet the estuary, littering my thighs

That I have always hated

Now, I whisper hello

Thank you

Keep going, please

Heal me if you have to

Today should be a Sunday

So I snooze the alarm

We’ll just have to be late

I’m not ready to play out, just yet.

Inventory 1

•            The grease soaked chip paper from two paper scollops, salted

•            A full vacuum bag

•            The first slice of bungy sponge

•            A bar of soap indented with fingernail marks (milk andhoney scented)

•            The last Christmas card that was signed with both oftheir names

•            200 euros

•            The syrup from a melted slush puppy dried sticky inthe glove compartment

•            The sweat gathered in the finger holes of a bowling ball

•            A 20p mix up from Frank’s on the corner (consisting only ofjelly snakes)

•            A sprinkle of talcum powder

•            The hair balled from a hairbrush about to be thrown tothe birds

•            The latch from the hallway phone

Say my names

The first letter left first, or just didn’t show

The last three the last to leave

The lilt of her voice

Greeting me, smiling

Vanished

Like a lisp

Like a night-time lightning storm

A little girl on a milk carton

But I just turned my back for a second.

I made a sign for the livingroom door

Had to change the start time because I’ve spent too long making

              the tickets

Glue and glitter litter the floor

As Dad drags his high blood pressure in over the threshold

Drags on his first cigarette before dinner

Mom grates cheese over instant mashed potato

And burns the pork chops just how he likes them.

I think of burning across my inner thighs

Muscle on fire

As my dance teacher sits on my back and I beg to become bendier

I don’t understand why my legs have to be so far apart—

Dance show tonight

My brother lies across the floor as I attempt to practice:

Playing Crash Bandicoot, his socks half of.

I trace shapes into the carpet with my feet, twirl in front of the

              screen and

He curses my name like I’ve thrown his football over a mountain top

But there’s a dance show on tonight and ITS NOT FAIR I NEED TO

              PRACTICE I’M GOING TO TELL

I steal my mom’s makeup that smells how I think Princess Diana would

Blush like a warrior, too much

My fingers shimmer, don’t linger as they’re

Wiped on the side of my dress—

I want my mom to cut my fringe before I go on

But the noise of hair being chopped,

the scrunch of my eyes too late for the blade

THERE’S A DANCE SHOW ON TONIGHT AND NO ONE SEEMS

              TO HAVE NOTICED.

A showcase of last week’s tournament

Where Mom let me wear her Scarlet Siren lipstick

The point now rounded like a popsicle stick half sucked

I’m holding a number, feet in first position

(Because I’ve become quite superstitious) Smile as wide as I can

Run my tongue across fillings after too many pick and mix dinners

Through the gaps in my grin

Imperfect equals deducted points

Scarlet siren is more a statement when kept shut.

there’s a dance show on tonight

I did not place, again.

Lipstick shade wasn’t right

Toes weren’t fully pointed

Stomach shape wasn’t right

Collarbone tips not fully pointed

My scalp scratched by hair grips, gelled back, head lice trapped

Thigh veins snapped from not warming up properly

“Drive on the footpath, skip the traffic. This is her first troupe piece

              and she’s finally making friends.”

I think of the wages spent on costumes I’ll outgrow in a month

Of growing without being able to stop

Of pork fat next to room temperature baked bean juice and my

              insides on my outside

I think of the hunger

To be good enough

Aged nine.

DANCE SHOW TONIGHT

I’ve placed ‘reserved’ signs on the sofa cushions

In the places we always sit.